Sugar Daddy (7 page)

It was so unlike what I had experienced with Gill. Hardy was infinitely more powerful, and yet so much gentler. One of his hands slid into my hair, his fingers cradling my head. His shoulders hunched over and around me, his free arm clamping across my back as if he wanted to pull me inside himself. He kissed me over and over, trying to discover every way our mouths could fit together. A gust of wind chilled my back, but heat surged wherever I touched against him.

He tasted the inside of my mouth, his breath coming in scalding rushes against my cheek. The intimate flavor of him confounded me with desire. I clung to him tightly, shaken and aroused and wanting it never to end, desperately gathering every sensation to hoard as long as possible.

Hardy pried away my clinging arms and urged me back with a forceful push. “Oh, damn,” he whispered, shivering. He moved from me and grasped the pole of the backstop, resting his forehead against it as if relishing the feel of chilled metal. “Damn,” he muttered again.

I felt sleepy and dazed, my balance wavering in the sudden absence of Hardy’s support. I scrubbed the heels of my hands over my eyes.

“That won’t happen again,” he said gruffly, still facing away from me. “I mean it, Liberty.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” I wasn’t, actually. And I must not have sounded too sorry, because Hardy threw a sardonic glance over his shoulder.

“No more practicing,” he said.

“You mean basketball practice or…what we just did?”

“Both,” he snapped.

“Are you mad at me?”

“No, I’m mad as hell at myself.”

“You shouldn’t be. You didn’t do anything wrong. I wanted you to kiss me. I was the one who—”

“Liberty,” he interrupted, turning toward me. Suddenly he looked weary and frustrated. He rubbed his eyes the same way I had rubbed mine. “Shut up, honey. The more you talk, the worse I’ll feel. Just go home.”

I absorbed his words, the inexorable set of his face. “Do you…do you want to walk me back?” I hated the thread of timidity in my own voice.

He threw me a wretched glance. “No. I don’t trust myself with you.”

Glumness settled over me, smothering the sparks of desire and elation. I wasn’t sure how to explain any of it, Hardy’s attraction to me, his unwillingness to pursue it, the intensity of my response…and the knowledge that I was never going to kiss Gill Mincey again.

Mama was about a week overdue when she finally went into labor in late May.

Springtime in Southeast Texas is a mean season. There are some pretty sights, the dazzling fields of bluebonnets, the flowering of Mexican buckeyes and redbuds, the greening of dry meadows. But spring is also a time when fire ants begin to mound after lying idle all winter, and the gulf whips up storms that spit out hail and lightning and twisters. Our region was scored by tornadoes that would double back in surprise attacks, jigsawing across rivers and down main streets, and other places tornadoes weren’t supposed to go. We got white tornadoes too, a deadly rotating froth that occurred in sunlight well after people thought the storm was over.

Tornadoes were always a threat to Bluebonnet Ranch because of a law of nature that says tornadoes are irresistibly attracted to trailer parks. Scientists say it’s a myth, tornadoes are no more drawn to trailer parks than anywhere else. But you couldn’t fool the residents of Welcome. Whenever a twister appeared in or around town, it headed either to Bluebonnet Ranch or another Welcome subdivision called Happy Hills. How Happy Hills got its name was a mystery, because the landscape was as flat as a tortilla and barely two feet over sea level.

Anyway, Happy Hills was a neighborhood of new two-story residences referred to as “big hair houses” by everyone else in Welcome who had to make do with one-level ranch dwellings. The subdivision had undergone just as many tornado strikes as Bluebonnet Ranch, which some people cited as an example of how tornadoes would just as likely strike a wealthy neighborhood as a trailer park.

But one Happy Hills resident, Mr. Clem Cottle, was so alarmed by a white tornado that cut right across his front yard that he did some research on the property and discovered a dirty secret: Happy Hills had been built on the remains of an old trailer park. It was a rotten trick in Clem’s opinion, because he would never have knowingly bought a house in a place where a trailer park once stood. It was an invitation to disaster. It was just as bad as building on an Indian graveyard.

Stuck with residences that had been exposed as tornado magnets, the homeowners of Happy Hills made the best of the situation by pooling their resources to build a communal storm shelter. It was a concrete room that had been half-sunk in the ground and banked with soil on all sides, with the result that there was finally a hill in Happy Hills.

Bluebonnet Ranch, however, didn’t have anything remotely resembling a storm shelter. If a tornado cut through the trailer park, we were all goners. The knowledge gave us a more or less fatalistic attitude about natural disasters. As with so many other aspects of our lives, we were never prepared for trouble.

We just tried like hell to get out of the way when it came.

Mama’s pains had started in the middle of the night. At about three in the morning, I realized she was up and moving around, and I got up with her. I’d found it nearly impossible to sleep anyway, because it was raining. Until we’d moved to Bluebonnet Ranch, I’d always thought rain was a soothing sound, but when it rains on the tin roof of a single-wide, the noise rivals the decibel level of an airplane hangar.

I used the oven timer to measure Mama’s contractions, and when they were eight minutes apart, we called the ob-gyn. Then I called Miss Marva to come take us to the family clinic, a local outreach of a Houston hospital.

I had just gotten my license, and although I thought I was a pretty good driver, Mama had said she would feel more comfortable if Miss Marva drove us. Privately I thought we would have been a lot safer with me behind the wheel, since Miss Marva’s driving technique was at best creative, and at worst she was an accident waiting to happen. Miss Marva drifted, turned from the wrong lanes, sped up and slowed down according to the pace of her conversation, and pushed the gas pedal flush to the floor whenever she saw a yellow light. I would have preferred Bobby Ray to drive, but he and Miss Marva had broken up a month earlier on suspicion of infidelity. She said he could come back when he figured out which shed to put his tools in. Since their separation, Miss Marva and I had gone to church by ourselves, her driving with me praying all the way there and back.

Mama was calm but chatty, wanting to reminisce about the day I was born. “Your daddy was such a nervous wreck when I was having you, he tripped over the suitcase and nearly broke his leg. And then he drove the car so fast, I yelled at him to slow down or I’d drive myself to the hospital. He didn’t stay in the delivery room with me—I think he was nervous he’d get in the way. And when he saw you, Liberty, he cried and said you were the love of his life. I’d never seen him cry before….”

“That’s real sweet, Mama,” I said, pulling out my checklist to make certain we had everything we needed in the duffel bag. I had packed it a month earlier, and I’d checked it a hundred times, but I was still worried I might have forgotten something.

The storm had worsened, thunder vibrating the entire trailer. Although it was seven in the morning, it was black as midnight. “Shit,” I said, thinking that getting into a car with Miss Marva in this kind of weather was risking our lives. There would be flash-flooding, and her low-slung Pinto wagon wasn’t going to make it to the family clinic.

“Liberty,” Mama said in surprised disapproval, “I’ve never heard you swear before. I hope your friends at school aren’t influencing you.”

“Sorry,” I said, trying to peer through the streaming window.

We both jumped at the sudden roar of hail on the roof, a battering shower of hard white ice. It sounded like someone was dumping coins onto our house. I ran to the door and opened it, surveying the bouncing balls on the ground. “Marble-sized,” I said. “And a few golf balls.”

“Shit,” Mama said, wrapping her arms around her tightening stomach.

The phone rang, and Mama picked it up. “Yes? Hey, Marva, I—You what? Just now?” She listened for a moment. “All right. Yes, you’re probably right. Okay, we’ll see you there.”

“What?” I asked wildly as she hung up. “What did she say?”

“She says the main road is probably flooded by now, and the Pinto won’t make it. So she called Hardy, and he’s coming to get us in the pickup. Since there’s only room for three of us, he’ll drop us off and come back to get Marva.”

“Thank God,” I said, instantly relieved. Hardy’s pickup would plow through anything.

I waited at the door and watched through the crack. The hail had stopped falling but the rain held steady, sometimes coming in cold sideways sheets through the narrow opening of the door. Every now and then I glanced back at Mama, who had subsided in the corner of the sofa. I could tell the pains were getting worse—her chatter had died away and she had drawn inward to focus on the inexorable process that had overtaken her body.

I heard her breathe my father’s name softly. A needle of pain went through the back of my throat. My father’s name, when she was giving birth to another man’s child.

It’s a shock the first time you see your parent in a helpless condition, to feel the reverse of your situations. Mama was my responsibility now. Daddy wasn’t here to take care of her, but I knew he would have wanted me to. I wouldn’t fail either of them.

The Cateses’ blue truck stopped in front, and Hardy strode to the door. He was wearing a fleece-lined windbreaker with the school panther logo on the back. Looking large and capable, he entered the trailer and closed the door firmly. His assessing glance swept over my face. I blinked in surprise as he kissed my cheek. He went to my mother, sank to his haunches before her and asked gently, “How does a ride in a pickup sound, Mrs. Jones?”

She mustered a faint laugh. “I think I might take you up on that, Hardy.”

Standing, he looked back at me. “Anything I should bring out to the truck? I’ve got the cover on the back, so it should stay pretty dry.”

I ran to get the duffel, and handed it to him. He headed for the door. “No, wait,” I said, continuing to load objects into his arms. “We need this tape player. And this—” I gave him a large cylinder with an attachment that looked like a screwdriver.

Hardy looked at it with genuine alarm. “What is it?”

“A hand pump.”

“For what? No, never mind, don’t tell me.”

“It’s for the birth ball.” I went to my bedroom and brought back a huge half-inflated rubber ball. “Take this out too.” Seeing his bewilderment, I said, “We’re going to inflate it all the way when we get to the clinic. It uses gravity to help the labor along, and when you sit on it, it puts pressure on the—”

“I get it,” Hardy interrupted hastily. “No need to explain.” He went out to stow the objects in the truck, and returned at once. “The storm’s at a lull,” he said. “We need to get going before another band hits us. Mrs. Jones, do you have a raincoat?”

Mama shook her head. As pregnant as she was, there was no way her old raincoat was going to fit. Wordlessly Hardy removed his panther jacket and guided her arms through the sleeves as if she were a child. It didn’t quite zip over her stomach, but it covered most of her.

While Hardy guided Mama out to the truck, I followed with an armload of towels. Since the water hadn’t broken yet, I thought it was best to be prepared. “What are those for?” Hardy asked after loading my mother into the front seat. We had to raise our voices to be heard above the din of the storm.

“You never know when you might need some towels,” I replied, figuring it would cause him unnecessary distress if I explained further.

“When my mother had Hannah and the boys, she never took more than a paper sack, a toothbrush, and a nightgown.”

“What was the paper sack for?” I asked in instant worry. “Should I run in and get one?”

He laughed and lifted me up to the front seat beside Mama. “It was to put the toothbrush and nightgown in. Let’s go, honey.”

The flooding had already turned Welcome into a chain of little islands. The trick of going from one place to another was to know the roads well enough that you could judge which flowing streams were passable. All it takes is two feet of water to float virtually any car. Hardy was a master at negotiating Welcome, taking a circuitous route to avoid low ground. He followed farm roads, cut through parking lots, and guided the pickup through currents until fountains of water spewed from the trenching tires.

I was amazed by Hardy’s presence of mind, the lack of visible tension, the way he made small talk with Mama to distract her. The only sign of effort was the notch between his brows. There is nothing a Texan loves more than to pit himself against the elements. Texans take a kind of ornery pride in the state’s raucous weather. Epic storms, killing heat, winds that threaten to strip a layer of skin off, the endless variety of twisters and hurricanes. No matter how bad the weather gets, or what level of hardship is imposed, Texans receive it with variations on a single question…“Hot enough for you?”…“Wet enough for you?”…“Dry enough for you?”…and so forth.

I watched Hardy’s hands on the wheel, the light capable grip, the water spots on his sleeves. I loved him so much, loved his fearlessness, his strength, even the ambition that would someday take him away from me.

“A few more minutes,” Hardy murmured, feeling my gaze on him. “I’ll get you both there, safe and sound.”

“I know you will,” I said, while the windshield wipers flailed helplessly at the flats of rain that pounded the glass.

As soon as we arrived at the family clinic, Mama was taken in a wheelchair to be prepped, while Hardy and I took our belongings to the labor room. It was filled with machines and monitors, and a neonatal open care warmer that looked like a baby spaceship. But the room’s appearance was softened by ruffled curtains, a wallpaper border featuring geese and baby ducks, and a gingham-cushioned rocking chair.

A stout gray-haired nurse moved around the room, checking the equipment and adjusting the level of the bed. As Hardy and I came in, she said sternly, “Only mothers-to-be and their husbands are allowed in the labor room. You’ll have to go to the waiting area down the hall.”

“There’s no husband,” I said, feeling a little defensive as I saw her brows inching up toward her hairline. “I’m staying to help my mother.”

“I see. But your boyfriend will have to leave.”

Hot color rushed over my face. “He’s not my—”

“No problem,” Hardy interrupted easily. “Believe me, ma’am, I don’t want to get in anyone’s way.”

The nurse’s stern face relaxed into a smile. Hardy had that effect on women.

Pulling a colored folder from the duffel bag, I gave it to the nurse. “Ma’am, I’d appreciate it if you’d read this.”

She looked suspiciously at the bright yellow folder. I had printed the words “
BIRTH PLAN
” on the front and decorated it with stickers of baby bottles and storks. “What is this?”

“I’ve written out our preferences for the labor experience,” I explained. “We want dim lighting and as much peace and quiet as possible, and we’re going to play nature sounds. And we want to maintain my mother’s mobility until it’s time for the epidural. About pain relief—she’s fine with Demorol but we wanted to ask the doctor about Nubain. And please don’t forget to read the notes about the episiotomy.”

Looking harassed, the nurse took the birth plan and disappeared.

I gave the hand pump to Hardy and plugged in the tape player. “Hardy, before you go, would you inflate the birth ball? Not all the way. Eighty percent would be best.”

“Sure,” he said. “Anything else?”

I nodded. “There’s a tube sock filled with rice in the duffel. I’d appreciate it if you’d find a microwave oven somewhere and heat it for two minutes.”

“Absolutely.” As Hardy bent to inflate the birth ball, I saw the line of his cheek tauten with a smile.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, but he shook his head and didn’t answer, only continued to smile as he obeyed my instructions.

By the time Mama was brought into the room, the lighting had been adjusted to my satisfaction, and the air was filled with the sounds of the Amazon rain forest. It was a soothing patter of rain punctuated with the chirping of tree frogs and the occasional cry of a macaw.